STOCKTON - Dr. Moses Elam looked out at the 240 students gathered before him, and in many of those young faces what he saw as he spoke was none other than himself.

"I was once where you are," Elam told the students. "I remember sitting in an auditorium just like you. But I had a dream. The world is yours if you want it. But it's going to cost you right now some work."

Elam, physician-in-chief of the Kaiser-affiliated Permanente Medical Group, addressed the students of Stockton Unified's Health Careers Academy at an assembly Monday morning in the University Park-based school's gym.

It was one more step forward in a burgeoning partnership between the medical group and the school, a relationship that for Elam is as much personal as professional.

The 61-year-old Elam wants to show the HCA students, who overwhelmingly come from low-income backgrounds, that they, too, can become medical professionals. One of the best ways he knows how to impart this message, he says, is to provide them with a role model.

Elam's own story is emblematic of the best aspects of the American Dream. The grandson of North Carolina sharecroppers and the first in his family to attend college, Elam spent childhood summers picking cucumbers and tobacco. In some ways, it wasn't all that different from the experiences of some HCA students whose parents earn their backbreaking livings in the fields of San Joaquin County. Elam said he hopes his own story can inspire the students to persevere in pursuit of their own dreams of a better life.

"It is important, I think, to see people who look like you and you can say, 'I can do that too,' " Elam says.

In the coming months, Elam's medical group will begin providing job-shadowing opportunities for some of the sophomore students at HCA, which is in its second year of operation. Additionally, the group has established a scholarship fund that will be worth $15,000 by the time the first students graduate from HCA in 2015. The medical group also will provide guest faculty and speakers at HCA and will encourage its physicians to make financial contributions to the school.

Elam's most direct contact at HCA is D'Angelo Garduno. The 16-year-old sophomore calls Elam "a motivator" and says, "I see myself becoming a man like he is."

D'Angelo, raised by a single mother, said he has an older brother serving a 26-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter. He says that as an eighth-grader at Spanos Elementary, he knew he would find trouble if he attended a large high school. Instead, he chose HCA, where he said he has found purpose, friendship and "love." He plans to become a family-practice physician.

Of Elam, he said, "I've never had nobody to be by my side like he is and mentor me and motivate me to do the things that I'm doing. Nobody's ever recognized the good that I was doing. ... It's very important."

Elam said he wants the mentorships his medical group will provide to assist D'Angelo and other students at HCA as they navigate the troubled road so many teens walk as they grow up in Stockton.

"When I look at my career, I can remember being young and having dreams and saying, 'What is my future going to hold?' " Elam said. "You don't know what these kids face every day when they go back home. It's easy to say, 'Just do it.' That's why they must have role models and mentors, people who can inspire them, motivate them and encourage them."